Parma FC Clutches at an Ear’s Chance
// UEFA Cup
Parma FC have lodged a protest with UEFA at the 0-3 result of the match against PFC CSKA. The Control and Disciplinary Body of Europe’s main football organization is to decide on Sunday which sanction should be imposed on the players of the Russian team in relation to the incident happened after the first goal of Daniel Carvalho when an explosion of a flare stunned Parma’s Luca Bucci, later taken to hospital.
Daniel Carvalho opened the scoring on the 10th minute of the match at Lokomotiv stadium. Shortly afterwards, firecrackers started falling down from the sector of CSKA’s fans, situated behind Luca Bucci’s goal. One of the flares exploded near Parma goalkeeper who immediately seized his ear, called a doctor and a UEFA representative showing them that he had been stunned. Bucci played on for the next ten minutes but afterwards asked for the substitution. Bucci was replaced by Sébastien Frey, broadly speaking, Parma main keeper but the team are known to be playing in the UEFA Cup by their second line-up.
The Italian club reported to Kommersant Friday that Luca Bucci had been unable to fly with the rest of the team to Italy and had been taken to hospital in Moscow with bad headache and nausea. It became known that the player accompanied in Russia by his wife and Massimo Manara, Parma’s doctor, was hospitalized in European Medical Center. The doctors there told Kommersant that “a barotraum” and “a partial hearing loss” were diagnosed for Bucci after the examination. His state of health is reported to be stable, which basically means that nothing grave happened to the keeper.
And still, Parma considered the incident a pretext for filing a complaint. The club’s leaders headed by its executive director Luca Baraldi hold a meeting on Friday, after which a document later sent to UEFA was complied. Parma’s press service made it clear the matter concerns a protest against the result of the game which, according to the Italians side, was impacted by the actions of CSKA’s fans and the trauma Bucci suffered.
An anonymous UEFA’s employer said that after studying the information presented by Parma FC and the report by UEFA delegate Mikhal Listkovich, the Control and Disciplinary Body at the Sunday meeting in Geneva was most likely to decide to impose sanctions on CSKA. It is not stipulated in the disciplinary part of UEFA’s regulations that a club may be punished for its fans’ misbehaviour. “Each case is viewed individually. A wide range of sanctions may be applied – starting from a notice and fine up to a rematch. Much depends on the club’s reputation. If similar incidents have never happened during its matches, the punishment will be lenient,” an employer said.
The latter should inspire some optimism with CSKA’s fans since the club does not enjoy the reputation of a “problematic” one in terms of the ensuring of order. On the other hand, UEFA’s stance on the football hooligans, which has hardened over the past years, should indeed put CSKA on the guard. It is because of football fans that two Italian clubs taking part in UEFA Champions League suffered a lot. Back in September last year, the Control and Disciplinary Body decided that Roma's UEFA match against FC Dynamo Kyiv would be awarded as a 0-3 forfeit victory to the Ukrainian side and that the Italian club would play their other two group stage home games behind closed doors after Roma’s fans had struck referee Anders Frisk by a missile thrown from the stands. April this year, UEFA’s Champions League quarter-final second leg was awarded to Milan as a 3-0 forfeit against Inter whose fans threw missiles on the pitch of San Siro stadium, with one striking Milan keeper Dida. Besides, Inter was fined CHF 300,000 ($248,600) and, like Roma, ordered to play the following four European club competition home matches behind closed doors. All the aforesaid matches, however, were abandoned by the decision of the referees and UEFA representatives. On the contrary, Alain Hamer, referee of the Moscow game, did not even considered abandonment of the match after Luca Bucci’s trauma.
Alexey Dospekhov, Yulia Osipova
All the Article in Russian as of May 07, 2005
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